Education Today

EDUCATION TODAY
KSHITIJ JHAMB ( XI GRADE)



BEING a student of class XI I can say that the only other thing rising in INDIA is its competition .You can see competition in every nook and corner of India …..the IIT’s the IIM’s I mean there’s a rat race going out there without anyone to put a stop.
The problem here is that education here is much of a narrow approach .Education here just means to laboriously work hours trying to memorize what you heard from your teacher’s lecture and just spit it out in the examination and never look back it .I know many of you might contradict it or may not take it that way but that’s the way it is, actually! I’ll give you an example every year thousands of students take up science in order to start a career in let’s say…...computers or entrepreneurship ,now why should these students endure a hellish life for two years of their trying to understand laws of thermodynamics when they know that its not their piece of cake …. will not do them any better in their life later and they wont look back at them once they are over !

Students are just ‘extracted’ because of this and as a result have to pay a hefty price for this afterwards because they know that the precious time they actually wasted could have been more productive. Study should be firstly practical based which can help the students in better implementation of their skills and secondly be something that students could associate themselves with.

Again taking lead in this regard is USA (at least their government has realized that something called CALCULATORS are already invented and can be used for calculations instead of poor student’s minds).And I don’t think that by allowing calculators in examinations they have done anything wrong after all …after the student years one hardly does any calculations himself! .USA and even some Indian schools have started something known as open –book examination wherein they believe that the curriculum is such that if the student has not understood the basic logic behind a principle he will go nuts in the examination even if he is allowed to browse through the book’s pages.
Another great innovation which I heard was ‘HIGH TECH HIGH ‘ a school in California opened with the aid of US government and Microsoft. It’s a dream school for every student-no books! no notebooks! No lectures!.......but don’t be too happy as yet… as that doesn’t mean no studies! They believe that one can understand anything rock-solid only by manually performing it .yeah you got that right when we are sitting in our classes trying to imagine what the real thing would be they ACTUALLY DO IT. Now don’t be surprised if I say that a 11 grade student there actually invented a infrared keyboard that works on zero hardware….and is even looked up by Microsoft for commercial use ….now that is what I call practical curriculum.

Similar changes are necessary everywhere …I know some people might say that if we allow calculators in examinations or maybe exclude some subjects that are there which god only knows why (like history)…..that the general aptitude in students will be lost and in order to know what they have to know they will forget what they need to know…..so the only solution to this according to me can be to exclude them from the main curriculum and encourage research based activities on them during the holidays …this way can solve both the teacher’s as well as student’s problems.
Be it this approach or some another the point is something must be done.
India has enormous potential….talent but are we using that to our full advantage?…
……….I leave this question up to you to answer.